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Microsoft Sentinel vs Splunk
March 12, 2025 | Author: Michael Stromann
21★
Microsoft Sentinel is a scalable, cloud-native solution that provides: Security information and event management (SIEM)
53★
We make machine data accessible, usable and valuable to everyone—no matter where it comes from. You see servers and devices, apps and logs, traffic and clouds. We see data—everywhere. Splunk offers the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. It enables the curious to look closely at what others ignore—machine data—and find what others never see: insights that can help make your company more productive, profitable, competitive and secure.
See also:
Top 10 SIEM software
Top 10 SIEM software
Microsoft Sentinel and Splunk are both excellent choices if you enjoy sifting through endless logs of security data, hunting for nefarious cyber threats and generally trying to stay one step ahead of the digital equivalent of Vogon poetry. They both detect threats, analyze logs and integrate with all sorts of fancy third-party tools that claim to make life easier but inevitably make you question your life choices. Both are cloud-friendly, both promise real-time threat response and both will happily ingest so much data that you’ll need a separate budget just to pay for storage.
Microsoft Sentinel, being the younger of the two, arrived in 2019, presumably because someone at Microsoft looked at Azure and thought, "What this really needs is a SIEM with a pay-as-you-go model!" It’s completely cloud-native, which means no pesky on-premises installations to worry about and it plays particularly well with Microsoft’s own ecosystem—because of course it does. Designed for organizations already committed to the great and mighty Azure, it offers serverless security monitoring, which sounds wonderfully futuristic until you realize that "serverless" just means "somebody else's servers and you'd better hope they work."
Splunk, on the other hand, has been around since 2003, which in tech years is practically prehistoric. Unlike its younger counterpart, it thrives in hybrid environments, meaning you can install it on-premises, in the cloud or in some confusing combination of the two that requires a dedicated team just to explain how it works. Its licensing model is notorious for inspiring both admiration and existential dread, as pricing is based on data ingestion and logs, as we all know, have an uncanny ability to multiply like tribbles. Despite all this, Splunk remains a beloved, albeit expensive, choice for organizations that need serious log-wrangling power and have accepted that managing cybersecurity is just another way of saying, "I enjoy controlled chaos."
See also: Top 10 SIEM software
Microsoft Sentinel, being the younger of the two, arrived in 2019, presumably because someone at Microsoft looked at Azure and thought, "What this really needs is a SIEM with a pay-as-you-go model!" It’s completely cloud-native, which means no pesky on-premises installations to worry about and it plays particularly well with Microsoft’s own ecosystem—because of course it does. Designed for organizations already committed to the great and mighty Azure, it offers serverless security monitoring, which sounds wonderfully futuristic until you realize that "serverless" just means "somebody else's servers and you'd better hope they work."
Splunk, on the other hand, has been around since 2003, which in tech years is practically prehistoric. Unlike its younger counterpart, it thrives in hybrid environments, meaning you can install it on-premises, in the cloud or in some confusing combination of the two that requires a dedicated team just to explain how it works. Its licensing model is notorious for inspiring both admiration and existential dread, as pricing is based on data ingestion and logs, as we all know, have an uncanny ability to multiply like tribbles. Despite all this, Splunk remains a beloved, albeit expensive, choice for organizations that need serious log-wrangling power and have accepted that managing cybersecurity is just another way of saying, "I enjoy controlled chaos."
See also: Top 10 SIEM software
